Fossils, page 3
So, Bob’s not your real name?
Bob looked at her and looked away. Gary knew him though, he thought suddenly. He’d put him onto the job in the first place. Though Gary had said that he himself was not known to the group. But someone must know someone somewhere along the line. Connecting the dots of strangers. That second shot, if it happened, why hadn’t he heard it? He thought, on the surface of his reasoning, that there had been no other shot. Panic and confusion could get things mixed up, could make people sense things that didn’t happen, and not sense things that did. He wondered which it had been and thought about mentioning it, sounding it out. He tried imagining the possibilities of that second shot. Into the air? The ceiling? One of the bystanders? He imagined it until it all blanked out, numbing his head, his thoughts aimed like pebbles into the water, forming a series of ripples before disappearing, one after another.
The news came on the TV and they moved to the sofa to watch the local headlines. A hospital was closing and people were standing outside it with home-made signs. It flicked to another story; some school was doing a sponsored silence, but there was nothing about them yet.
Maybe it’s too early. Maybe they don’t report stuff like that, she said. The news is like that you know, just stuff they decide they want you to know. She was looking for other stuff whenever she saw the news. Wildfires had been burning in Australia for seven months, though it was hardly ever on the news now. If you wanted to find out about it, you had to look it up on the internet, find it for yourself. Although, sometimes she was glad it wasn’t on anymore. Sometimes she didn’t want to think about it. She still had nightmares about all the charred bodies of kangaroos and koala bears she had seen on TV.
Do you have any playing cards? She thought that would provide a good distraction, while away the rest of the afternoon. She knew a few games. She could even do a couple of tricks.
No.
3
The blanket he’d given her smelled of old dust and raw onions and rabbit droppings, but that was alright. She could stay here a while. She’d had enough of living at home. She’d show them. She might even move in here. Joshy too. She was sure that he would fit in just fine. Maybe in a few weeks, – she didn’t want to be pushing her luck right now. Bob might need a bit of persuading in the meantime, but she was good at that sort of thing. No one would bug her here and it was comfortable. More than comfortable. The carpet reminded her of the carpet in her nan’s house. The big brown and orange swirls, the way the pattern half-resembled an opening flower and half just fell into itself. Her nan had lived next door and they had spent most of the time there, her and Joshy. She would watch TV there on the sofa, or read, while Nan and Joshy would kind of talk to each other. Nan must have been losing her mind even then because she would ask Joshy things like where her mam and dad were, even though they’d been dead for over forty years, and where her husband was, dead for twenty. Joshy would say, Gone park. Or Gone pictures. Sometimes various answers all in the same hour. They satisfied her just the same. But, when she asked Sherrie-Lee the same questions and she’d replied something like gone to the park, she’d keep questioning her further. Why would they go to the park? Why would they leave us here? They’ d have been back from the park by now? As though she didn’t believe Sherrie-Lee, as though it was only Joshy’s answers that could soothe her. As though they both had some special connection in the brain that nobody else could understand. As though the defective things in both their brains were transmitting some special understanding that couldn’t be detected from the outside. Couldn’t be understood or shared by anybody else. She’d sometimes call them the names of her own children. She would call Sherrie-Lee their mother’s name Beryl, or Susan, their aunt, and Joshy would get the name of their uncle, Patrick. She would make them boiled eggs for tea and sit with Joshy for hours, watching television with him, or singing him all those old poor songs like The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot, and Dear Old Daddy’s Whiskers. Sherrie-Lee thought about how she was always singing to them or teaching them songs. Joshy would never’ve talked so well as he did if it wasn’t for all Nan’s songs. She recited a few lines of a song to herself as she lay there on the sofa in the fading light. It came back to her easily, though it seemed sad the way it sounded, spoken rather than sung. The words came out flat and dry, sucked clean of all melody. Even as her nan was forgetting everything else, she could still sing a whole song right through to the end. Word perfect, too. But then she’d say something like – speaking over Joshy as though he wasn’t there – What’s wrong with that kid? Why can’t he speak proper? As though she didn’t know him at all. And Joshy would repeat Wrong with kid over and over. And it would become a thread for the whole afternoon or evening as it became fixed in both their minds. Nan repeating the question and Joshy repeating the words. It would’ve been more sad if it hadn’t also been a bit funny, and they hadn’t all been so used to each other. Sometimes her nan laughed at it too, when she asked it and heard Joshy repeating Wrong with kid. She would laugh and shake her head. Her laugh was loud and musical and when she stopped laughing, she would say softly to herself, I don’t know. Sherrie-Lee missed that cosiness. It was never the same with just her and Joshy, almost like you needed someone else, a grown-up pulling it all together. She would visit her nan when she couldn’t remember a name or a thing and cuddle up to her and start singing one of her songs and then her nan would join in and take over and sing it right to the end in her beautiful voice. A voice that her husband had said was like the voice of someone called Vera Lynn. She used to say that, before she lost her memories. She’d smile in a proud, happy way when she told them, but after a while she forgot even that. She had kept some of her habits though. Even after the time she was forgetting almost everything and started going outside and getting lost. Habits like the way she answered the phone. She never got over the newness of it, even though it was old-fashioned to have a phone line in the house when everyone had moved over to mobile phones. It seemed to startle everyone when it rang. The loudness of it. It didn’t ring often, but when it did, the same routine was played over. They would look at each other in surprise. A kind of who could that be? took over, sometimes said out loud, sometimes just thought. Then, Nan would run over to the phone as though this had to be done to make up for the stunned moment of inaction, to make sure that the caller was caught in time, before hanging up. Then she would pick up the receiver and her normally loud voice would give way to a feeble, put-on voice, the voice of a weak, old lady. And then, depending on who it was that had called, the feeble voice would disappear in an instant, or be drawn out to continue whatever effect her nan was trying to create.
The only picture on the wall of Bob’s living room was a small, faded photo of the sea and the edge of a cliff in a red plastic frame. It was so boring that it must have been some special place to whoever had bothered to put the photo in the frame. It wasn’t even a good picture. The light in the picture wasn’t that good and it looked dull and dim. The place needed cheering up a bit. It was all old-looking and she wondered if it was a temporary place, just for the bank job, or whether he lived here. She had learned that he didn’t like too many questions. She would have to slip questions in gradually. There were still a lot of things she needed to find out. His real name. What he was about. What his plans were. She would tell him stuff about herself too. That’s what you needed to do when you got kidnapped. You had to get them onside, make them see you as a whole person so they felt empathy for you. She knew all about it. She’d seen Silence of the Lambs and that other film. If this was his permanent home, she could help him fix it up a bit. This involved just buying a new set of cushions, which is what her mam did when they moved to a new place. They’d done a lot of moving to different places before getting the place next to her nan. She thought it funny, that. All the different places they’d lived in, sometimes just for a couple of weeks, and then they’d ended up right next door to Nan’s. Funny how it took all that time and the house had been there all along. Right under their noses. Her mother used to have a thing for motivational cushions. The more motivational the better. That’s what her mam had thought. Sherrie-Lee had liked it when she bought them. Had liked seeing her involved in something. She helped her carry them back all the way from town. Be Bold, Be Brave, Be You, they said. Believe it, Achieve it. Or Without the Rain There’d Be No Rainbows. Daft stuff like that. Not that you’d ever find Sherrie-Lee buying crap like that. After a while, they always depressed her, as they got dirty and squashed out of shape. Their mottos seemed sarcastic and taunting. They made her feel extra sad - the way they mocked. The cheapness of them. They seemed to suck every last bit of hope out of you, every time one caught your eye. It had been a while since her mother had bought any motivational cushions or anything for their house. She looked around the room. Even if they didn’t fix this place up it was fine the way it was. It was just a place. And more than that, it felt like a calm and easy place to be. It didn’t ask anything of her. A bit like her shed at home, only here it was dry and warm. It wasn’t really her shed, she just used it when she wanted to be on her own. It used to belong to the people who lived there before her. It still had stuff they’d left behind in it. A spade. A box of dried-up cans of paint. Some old bits of wood. She kept some of her own special things in there. Stuff she didn’t want her sister poking into.
She felt wide awake. Lights stretched out in straight lines on the ceiling from passing cars, reaching out, then receding at odd angles, forming strange geometric shapes. She had been listening to the screeching of swifts outside but now they had quietened down for the night. Outside was a street lamp and the yellowed glow of it shone through the edges of the curtains. It was the end of June and it was gone ten and it had only just begun to get properly dark, though she could still see stretches of thin cloud, like cigarette smoke, high in the sky. Coming from the flat upstairs, she could hear the droning of a TV set. Every so often, music boomed out of it and then died down. It was comforting, the sound of somebody else’s life nearby.
When she peered out and up at the sky, she saw that already a few stars were out. The nearest ones. The sky hadn’t yet reached its deepest dark, when it threw up the light from more distant stars. The nearest star to the Earth was Proxima Centauri, which Sher-rie-Lee had memorised and thought it sounded a bit like some Italian singer’s name, or the name of an exotic dancer. It was a dull kind of star, though, and you couldn’t always see it. Spotting them was difficult enough anyway and sometimes she pretended to herself that she had seen constellations or planets, otherwise star spotting got too frustrating. You had to make space for it in your imagination. Be open to a little fuddling. It was hard to find a way in with the stars otherwise. There was no order to them that she could find. They were just randomly out there. Sometimes knowing the constellations helped. Beyond that, there was nothing to help her with knowing them, with memorising their names and positions. If you wanted to travel to that closest star, it would take one hundred years to get there. She liked that they were all so far away, that they were so far away that what you see of them isn’t really how they are. They aren’t really little twinkling dots of light. Being all that distance away our view of them gets distorted, they could be anything, and if you thought about it, looking down from all that distance away, so could we. She knew all this because there was a great section on space in the library and it was one of the sections she was making her way through. There were 318 books about space. If you took one out every week it would take six years and two months to read them all. She had read twenty-three of them in two years, so even if she stepped up her game and read one a week, she would be eighteen by the time she had got through them all. She’d already made the decision that some of the more difficult ones she would leave to that last year. In one, she had read that because the possible number of other universes was infinite, it was likely that, somewhere out there in the infinite vastness, there would be a planet that is just like ours, that had developed in the same way, under the same conditions. The librarian, who she found out was called Claire, had agreed with her that it did seem like a crazy idea. That’s the thing with infinity, she had said, it makes anything and everything possible. That was also the great thing about all those books. All those ideas in there. It was mind-blowing. The library was her absolute favourite place to be. It was always warm and cosy and nobody harassed her there. Even when she was there during school hours. Nobody said shouldn’t you be in school? Or gave her special sideways looks. It was as though they knew the same thing that Sherrie-Lee knew, that you could learn a whole lot more in the library than you could ever learn in school. It gave her space too to think through all her problems. The ones that she couldn’t solve. It even helped her with those, too. It helped her draw her mind elsewhere, so she didn’t have to think all the time about the same stuff. All those universes and possibilities out there. It helped her escape in lots of ways. And taught her stuff about the world that even most grown-ups didn’t know. Even her teachers. And the best of it was she’d not even yet read one per cent of the books in there. So, there were all those other books just there waiting for her. It was Claire who always saved new books that came in about animals and space for her, because she knew that’s what she loved to read. And stuff about saving the planet too, because that was one of the other things she was into. Saving all the habitats so the animals would have somewhere to live too, somewhere to find food and shelter. She liked the way Claire didn’t look like anyone else she’d ever known. She had blue hair, for a start. Not punky and spiky, though. It was always combed neatly, in the style of a short bob. She didn’t overdo it on the makeup either. Just mascara and eyeliner and purple lipstick, which made her teeth look really white. She always wore long-sleeved flowery blouses. Beneath the cuffs you could just make out the beginnings of her tattoos, which started just above her wrists. The kind that were not just lines, but shaded in so you could see the textures and shadows like real drawings. The kind of tattoos drawn by real artists.
4
Bob knocked on the door of the living room before he came through in the morning.
On his way to the kitchen, he said, I’ll boil a couple of eggs and then you can have something to eat before you go.
Suit yourself, she replied. So he was still on about that, she thought. He wasn’t much of a kidnapper, that was for sure.
Put the news on, he said.
She picked up the remote and flicked at it until she found a news channel, even though she was actually, if anyone cared to notice, already watching something. There was an image of a big factory building on fire. And a news presenter in front of it saying how the firefighters had been working through the night to try and save it. They didn’t yet know how it had started but eyewitnesses had reported hearing an explosion in the early hours.
Bob stepped back into the living room to see what was happening. There’s always something, he said. Tell me if anything comes on.
The screen flipped to a picture of an old cinema, and somebody being interviewed said that it was important for our national heritage to save the old cinemas like this one, and that’s what their community group was going to do. They had started a fund to buy it and restore it. Make it into a community cinema. Putting the community first. There were a couple of kids behind them, across the road, waving and trying to get on camera. They walked first in one direction and then turned to walk back so they could keep in the frame. It took them a while before they built up courage to wave at the camera.
She tapped into the egg, breaking the shell at the top with the back of a teaspoon. It was all dried up inside. I like my eggs dippy, she said, looking down into it with exaggerated disappointment.
I’ll inform the chef.
I didn’t mean to be ungrateful. Thanks for making it.
I can never get them like that, he said like he was genuinely sorry. It’s hard to tell. They look the same no matter how long you boil them for.
They watched the last bit of the news, but there was still nothing on about them.
Listen, he said as she changed the channel back. My landlord is not so crazy about me having people stay.
He came to stand in front of her when he got no reply, and said it again. She was trying to get back into watching the TV. All the while, she could tell he was anxious about something, because he kept half-approaching her. Maybe that’s why he didn’t have any breakfast. She could see him, in the floating periphery of her vision, like he was rehearsing something. Preparing himself. He’d already ruined one show for her by making her switch to the news, and now he was ruining ScrewIt on top of that. It was a game show she’d gotten into this year. The contestants came on and tried to score as few points as possible by thinking of answers to questions that hardly anybody else had thought of. The answer must have been thought of by somebody though. It must be a genuine answer to a question. You couldn’t just say some random thing to the question. Like if they asked the name of a popular zoo animal, you couldn’t just say potato or even scarlet harlequin frog. It had to be an actual animal that someone else had said. And even though the scarlet harlequin frog was an actual animal, nobody would ever say it because it was so unusual. Nobody would even know it had ever existed, and now it didn’t anymore because it was extinct. You scored a point if you chose a more popular answer than your opponent.
Every time a contestant scored a point an oversized plastic screw would screw into a block with their face pasted onto it, gradually pushing the block out of its frame. When they got to ten points the block would be pushed out of the bottom of the frame and that contestant would be out. The wrong answer sound would come on really loudly and all the lights in the studio would flash on and off and the loser would have to walk off the stage. The presenter called it ‘the walk of shame’ and some of the audience booed and hissed. It seemed mean but wasn’t as bad as all the other shows that tried to humiliate people. It was just stupid. As dumb as any other game show, but she was really into it. Looking for it, whenever she turned on the television. It was on practically all the time, in the morning and then again in the afternoon. She even watched the repeats.
